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In
architecture,
ornament is a decorative detail used to embellish parts of a
building or interior furnishing. Ornament can be carved from stone,
wood or precious metals, formed with plaster or clay, or impressed
onto a surface as applied ornament. A wide variety of decorative
styles and motifs
have been developed for architecture and the applied arts,
including ceramics, furniture, metalwork and textiles.

Cultural heritage

Styles of ornamentation can be studied in
reference to the specific culture
which developed unique forms of decoration, or modified ornament
from other cultures. The Ancient
Egyptian culture is the first recorded civilization to add
decoration to their buildings. Their ornament takes the forms of
the natural world in that climate, decorating the capitals of
columns and walls with images of papyrus and palm trees. Assyrian culture
produced ornament which shows influence from Egyptian sources and a
number of original themes, including figures of plants and animals
of the region.

During the 19th
century, the acceptable use of ornament, and its precise
definition became the source of aesthetic controversy in academic
Western architecture, as architects and their critics searched for
a suitable style. "The great question is," Thomas
Leverton Donaldson asked in 1847, "are we to have an
architecture of our period, a distinct, individual, palpable style
of the 19th century?" . In 1849, when Matthew
Digby Wyatt viewed the
French Industrial Exposition set up on the Champs-Elysées
in Paris, he disapproved in recognizably modern terms of the
plaster ornaments in faux-bronze and faux woodgrain:

Both internally and externally there is a good
deal of tasteless and unprofitable ornament... If each simple
material had been allowed to tell its own tale, and the lines of
the construction so arranged as to conduce to a sentiment of
grandeur, the qualities of "power" and "truth," which its enormous
extent must have necessarily ensured, could have scarcely fail to
excite admiration, and that at a very considerable saving of
expense.

Contacts with other cultures through colonialism and the new
discoveries of archaeology expanded the
repertory of ornament available to revivalists. After about 1880,
photography made details of ornament even more widely available
than prints had done.

Modern ornament

Modern
architecture, conceived of as the elimination of ornament in
favor of purely functional structures, left architects the problem
of how to properly adorn modern structures. There were two
available routes from this perceived crisis. One was to attempt to
devise an ornamental vocabulary that was new and essentially
contemporary. This was the route taken by architects like Louis
Sullivan and his pupil Frank
Lloyd Wright, or by the unique Antoni
Gaudí. Art Nouveau,
for all its excesses, was a conscious effort to evolve such a
"natural" vocabulary of ornament.

A more radical route abandoned the use of
ornament altogether, as in some designs for objects by Christopher
Dresser. At the time, such unornamented objects could have been
found in many unpretending workaday items of industrial design,
ceramics produced at the Arabia manufactory in Finland, for
instance, or the glass insulators of electric lines.

This latter approach was described by architect
Adolf
Loos in his 1908 manifesto, translated into English in 1913 and
polemically titled Ornament
and Crime, in which he declared that lack of decoration is the
sign of an advanced society. His argument was that ornament is
economically inefficient and "morally degenerate", and that
reducing ornament was a sign of progress. Modernists were eager to
point to American architect Louis
Sullivan as their godfather in the cause of aesthetic
simplification, dismissing the knots of intricately patterned
ornament that articulated the skin of his structures.

With the work of Le Corbusier
and the Bauhaus through the
1920s and 1930s, lack of decorative detail became a hallmark of
modern
architecture and equated with the moral virtues of honesty,
simplicity, and purity. In 1932 Philip
Johnson and Henry-Russell
Hitchcock dubbed this the "International
Style". What began as a matter of taste was transformed into an
aesthetic mandate. Modernists declared their way as the only
acceptable way to build. As the style hit its stride in the
highly-developed postwar work of Mies
van der Rohe, the tenets of 1950s modernism became so strict
that even accomplished architects like Edward
Durrell Stone and Eero
Saarinen could be ridiculed and effectively ostracized for
departing from the aesthetic rules.

At the same time, the unwritten laws against
ornament began to come into serious question. "Architecture has,
with some difficulty, liberated itself from ornament, but it has
not liberated itself from the fear of ornament," Summerson observed
in 1941.

One reason was that the very difference between
ornament and structure is subtle and perhaps arbitrary. The pointed
arches and flying buttresses of Gothic
architecture are ornamental but structurally necessary; the
colorful rhythmic bands of a Pietro
Belluschi International Style skyscraper are integral, not
applied, but certainly have ornamental effect. Furthermore,
architectural ornament can serve the practical purpose of
establishing scale, signaling entries, and aiding wayfinding, and
these useful design tactics had been outlawed. And by the
mid-1950s, modernist figureheads Le Corbusier
and Marcel
Breuer had been breaking their own rules by producing highly
expressive, sculptural concrete work.

The argument against ornament peaked in 1959 over
discussions of the Seagram
Building, where Mies
van der Rohe installed a series of structurally unnecessary
vertical I-beams on the outside of the building, and by 1984, when
Philip
Johnson produced his AT&T Building in Manhattan with an
ornamental pink granite neo-Georgian pediment, the argument was
effectively over. In retrospect, critics have seen the AT&T
Building as the first Postmodernist
building.